Did “Government Investment” Make America Great? Obama Thinks So.

posted at 6:45 pm on April 1, 2012 by John Hawkins

Obama said that Republicans have “one message and that is, we’re going to make sure that we cut people’s taxes even more — so that by every objective measure our deficit is worse and we will slash government investments that have made this country great,” he argued, “not because it’s going to balance the budget, but because it’s driven by our ideological vision about how government should be. That’s their agenda, pure and simple.”

You learn a lot from Professor Obama, don’t you? You may have thought the Founding Fathers, who strongly believed in low taxes, small government, and checks and balances to keep politicians from gaining too much power helped make America a great nation. You might give even more credit to the many soldiers who gave their lives for freedom, along with the great American inventors, entrepreneurs, and the masses of decent Americans who worked hard, took care of their families, and pursued the American dream.

Instead, Obama seems to believe this country is great because a bunch of know-it-all politicians confiscated people’s money and “invested” it for them.

Why, just think of all the wonderful “investments” we’ve had since Obama became President. What would we have ever done without the Cash for Clunkers program? What about the loan to Solyndra? We also can’t forget the greatest Obama “investment” of them all, the stimulus bill. The Obama administration said we had to borrow a trillion dollars to create “jobs, jobs, jobs” and keep unemployment under 8%. What did we get out of that “investment?” A bunch of “projects funded by the federal stimulus” road signs? Wow, that was money well spent. Obama might as well have just asked liberals to write “I heart Obama” in toilet stalls across the country. It would have had about the same impact and we could have saved a trillion dollars.

Here’s a newsflash for Barack Obama: government investments didn’t make this country great. The government’s role in America’s greatness was building roads, securing America against enemies foreign and domestic, street lights, a few basic regulations and getting out of everyone’s way. The people did all the rest and the very fact that Obama is lolling around the White House, thinking that he’s responsible for America’s greatness because he’s confiscating money from people who’ve earned it and doling it out to a bunch of bureaucrats, campaign contributors, and wasteful government programs is as galling as it as foolish.

When you have cases like Solyndra proving how wasteful the government can be with the peoples money I see no problem with slashing government investments. Let them be a little more picky with our money.

It’s bad enough that the left want the government to operate as venture capitalists for their pet projects. But to want them to act as venture capitalists with an unlimited tap into our wallets and not to hold them responsible fora return is insanity.

I’ve been arguing about this ever since Pres Obama first started abusing the term government investments. Governments are not empowered to make investments. An investment is when you take your own hard earned capital and place it in a vehicle where there is a risk you may not see a return on that investment. As it is your own money, you will Carefully select which vehicles to place your money in. The things government spends money on are Expenses. If you need more police cars because you need to bring crime rates down, that is an expense, not an investment. Why do we not have a candidate who will pick up and Fisk the President every time he says things this asinine? How come it is pointed out by conservative pundits but doesn’t get out to the Mainstream?

Odd though, If this President had his way, projects like Hoover dam, Mount Rushmore and so many other great works for the public good, would never have happened.

For one thing the nation would have been too broke to even borrow the money and for another Obama’s ideology is towards flannel gray apartments with exposed plumbing, and then there’s the liberation front.

“Obama said that Republicans have “one message and that is, we’re going to make sure that we cut people’s taxes even more — so that by every objective measure our deficit is worse and we will slash government investments that have made this country great,”

Let me get this straight oh wise one, you tax other people and use their money to fund your government investments and they end up with a multi trillion dollar deficit. Wow what a financial whiz you are. No wonder you never ran a business or anything else. You’re nothing but a lying, thieving politician.

All this arguing about the internet. “The Internet” is not one of the things than made America great. The internet is a nice piece of communications engineering, but how did it help America become “great”? The fact is, it didn’t.

When we think of the “greatness” of America, we think mostly of the things that the modern liberal/progressive mind despises: westward expansion, the building of the railroads, electrification projects, hydroelectric dams, the interstate system, etc. Can you imagine getting approval to build these things now in the face of the lobbying effort that would be brought against them by the “progressive” groups of today?

When the government bought the Louisiana Purchase, the land was there. There were groups who thought it was a mistake to do it, but the land was there, everyone agreed on that. Railroads were a proven technology when they were extended across the nation (but then, the government didn’t have a role in that one — it was purely private enterprise). Hydroelectric plants, roads, etc., — all that technology was in place, all the government did was fund the expansion of it on a large scale. What the government wants to waste our tax dollars on today are unproven, economically unready favored “green” technologies. It’s as if Hoover Dam had been started before AC transmission had been discovered.

Government “investment” did have a place in some of the building of America’s greatness, but to compare the money wasted on electric cars and solar panels with those efforts is a joke.

“Government investment” That phrase is a lie right out of the box. The government has nothing of its own without stealing it from citizens.

Without public funds the internet research would have stalled.

liberal4life on April 1, 2012 at 7:51 PM

That is a bald faced lie. The pressure upon private companies for swifter communication infrastructure is what actually built the internet and those who posted accurate information about it’s real beginnings are correct.

We have far more examples of great inventions being built with private capital than those made with confiscated taxes.

Taking that as true for the purposes of this conversation. It is true that the gov’t has at times invested in things which have ultimately been successful in the hands of private businesses/individuals. That does not translate into “gov’t investment made America great”.

Defending that wholly ignorant statement by saying “but the internet” is just silly. Gov’t investment did not build America or make America great. Gov’t investment has accomplished some things, particularly when done in areas the gov’t legitimately should be involved, like the military, or Hoover damn. Or even possibly the early years of NASA.

But government investment did not build America or make it great. Private enterprise and freedom made America great. Because you can point to 1 thing the gov’t invested in, such as the internet, which likely would have still evolved without any gov’t investment, as evidence that it was “gov’t investment” that made America great, is ignoring the millions upon millions of private investments, private companies, that created our economy and made us a great nation.

This phrase and your defense of it is the ultimate difference between liberal and conservative thinking. Liberals believe that gov’t is the fount of all things – that life, liberty, happiness, success – all stem from the gov’t and therefore the gov’t should be worshiped and given total power to bring about utopia. That gov’t is a loving, gentle father who will provide all our wants and needs and make us whole if we only submit to its greater glory.

Conservatives believe that the gov’t mostly stymies liberty, happiness and success and should be as limited as possible while still performing the functions that gov’t are legitimate spheres for gov’t to act – such as law enforcement and national defense.

Only someone who believes in the wonderfulness of gov’t can look at our history and believe that gov’t investment is what made America great. That govt’ has been efficient and effectual in the areas where it decides to put money and those “investments” have created our economy, etc.

And, let’s not forget, most things that successfully stem from gov’t investment (mostly military innovations that translate to civilian life) were developed by private businesses that the gov’t contracted with and paid. It’s not as if the gov’t created those things or had the ideas for those things. The gov’t merely provided money it took from citizens to pay for things that private entities were usually already working on. So, perhaps gov’t investment sped up such research and innovation, but it was not gov’t investment that created it, or spawned the idea and most of those things would have been developed eventually without gov’t investment.

If gov’t investment were the true driving force behind scientific breakthroughs, then the USSR would have had significantly more major scientific breakthroughs than America. As would China or any other centrally controlled economy. That they don’t is evidence that it is never gov’t investment that drives innovation.

Answer to the bolded question: very possibly. Case in point: Texas Instruments had a worldwide digital communication network before the days of the internet that was funded solely by the company itself. The initial purpose of the network was to provide critical communications between its headquarters and the many semiconductor fabrication facilities it had across the world. That system grew into a massive communication and data repository, allowing TI employees anywhere in the world to send messages back and forth and to access key company information. It would not have been a stretch for that type of communication system to have been expanded to a commercial network.

So, in short, yes the internet could have arisen without government investment.

AZfederalist on April 1, 2012 at 8:21 PM

Interesting bit of trivia: The network created by Texas Instruments ended up utilizing the same package switching theory that the DARPA-funded IMP’s used some years later, all based on Leonard Kleinrock’s pioneering mathematical theories. If the question is “would the internet have been possible without government funding,” the answer is a most emphatic YES.

Obamba is the biggest fool this country has ever seen. But you should have known that from looking at him. What a moron – and they pass him as an intellectual and a constitutional lawyer. Don’t make we laugh.

Who funded the development of the mouse?
Who funded the development of the graphical user interface?
Who funded the development of all the different OS in use today?
Who funded the development of modern switches and routers?
Who funded the development of cell phones?
Who funded the development of the ipad and other tablets?
Who funded the development of gestures UI for those tablets?
Who funded the development of wifi?
Who funded the development of wifi security protocols?
Who funded the development of software tools to build sites?
Who funded the development of hosting companies to host sites?
Who funded the development of databases to store data on sites?

Who funded the software that this site uses to blog?

For every “government success” that you can come up with, I can come up with a dozen more that did not require government funding. So if you want to highlight your idiocy by pointing out how we should take more money from successful, efficient companies and give it to slower, INEFFICIENT government projects… be my guest. If private companies didn’t run with ideas, the military would still be using ARPANET.